What She Knew 

She had a birthday, became thirty, became morbid and suffering and told her husband she would bear no children, that inherent in birth is the sentence of death, that all childbearing is selfish, an illusion of immortality and how well she knew that she would die soon (what is forty, fifty more years compared to eternity?), that she was powerless, that her only life was moving along a path she could not remember freely choosing, and she would not know all experience, live all the lives, reach all the corners that she might, but if nothing else, she said, she wished better for her unborn offspring than this anguish, this knowledge of nothingness-after-life.

Take an aspirin, he said. Not unkindly.

# Published inWindy City Times Pride Issue (in slightly different form). Copyright S. J. Powers, 2013.